| I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment. 1. Reduced dependency on oil = less money in oil = less money for a lot of countries that historically act quite poorly on the world stage. 2. 100% better for global warming than combustion cars. 3. Is mining lithium & disposing on lithium batteries incorrectly worse for the environment than oil manufacturing, production & transport? I don't know 100% but the massive oil spills we regularly have would make me think lithium is actually better here. 4. Lithium batteries at grid-scale reduce blackouts which means you don't spin up a bunch of local generators. They also make wind & solar power generation available off-peak reducing reliance on coal & natural gas. 5. Are car batteries likely to be improperly recycled? I would think legislation would minimize the problem. Even without legislation, my impression is that today's used car batteries are still extremely valuable & end up being reused rather than recycled. 6. More investment in lithium ion batteries = more money & investment in better batteries (lithium ion or otherwise). This improves efficiency across the board for mobile applications, cars, grid applications, etc (something we don't get with internal combustion engines). The incomplete reasoning in your post is you're evaluating lithium standalone instead of examining the cost vs replacement (how does lithium ion fare against alternatives? are there better alternatives). Can you propose what you see as better alternatives rather than just making blanket complaints and blaming corporate democrats? (Also, lithium batteries are now a left/right idealogy thing? WTF). |
I though the point was that the high energy-density was convenient for mobility, but poor on most other metrics, including manufacturing complexity, stability, and safety.
Grid-scale wouldn't need to care so much about energy density versus stability and maintenance, in which case lead-acid, or compressed-gas storage should shine.